


spreading wide my narrow Hands to gather Paradise

by greywash



Category: Original Work
Genre: And not starting over, Depression, Established Relationship, F/F, Starting Over, Teasing, moving forward
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 05:58:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16212875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: Lindy hunches into her sweater. "How's the garden?"Maura squints at her. "You're not serious about that, are you?" Maura tears off a piece of muffin: zucchini, as it turns out. No nuts. Lindy knows what she likes.





	spreading wide my narrow Hands to gather Paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anabel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anabel/gifts).



> Title from [Emily Dickinson](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-dwell-in-possibility-466). **anabel** , this isn't the fandom we matched on, but your prompt was so wonderful I had to go with it—I interpreted "confused gardener" somewhat slant, but I hope you enjoy it!

Maura wakes up with the sharp stab of light from the dawn through the front window, hitting the toaster, reflecting into the sink, and driving directly into her cerebellum, which is how she knows she fell asleep on the couch.

Rubbing at her face, she drags herself upright (ish), blinking blearily at the living room. It hasn't changed: a mess of blankets and tissues and discarded sweaters, two pairs of shoes. Today, she waits for herself to think: _today, I'll clean it up_ ; but she doesn't. Instead a strange, prickling feeling is gathering at the back of her skull: impatience, she thinks, almost. The sort of bored, eye-rolling annoyance that she learned well to stifle, after almost a decade in L.A. She shuffles her feet into her slippers and into the kitchen, to start the coffee.

She stays annoyed. That's new. Three cups of coffee and a not-quite-resented grilled cheese later, she squeezes her dripping washcloth over the bathtub, and hangs it up. Squared. Neat. Is that, like, the sixth stage, annoyance? She's not sure where she is anymore. She squints at her reflection, toothpaste foaming out of the corners of her mouth. She looks—different, sort of, but not really. She looks like herself, after spending a month and a half gross-sobbing into assorted items of dirty laundry once the tissues ran out.

Ugh. The tissues. She stops sitting on the floor by the base of the kitchen bar, but she got most of them, she thinks.

Lindy drops by, again, after her shift. This time, Maura's dressed at least: she waves a hand: _see?_ Lindy smirks and passes her a cup of tea and a muffin.

"How was work?" Maura asks. An ironic, plosive snap on the _k_ : ugh, she can't even help it, can she. "Sorry," she says, and slurps at her tea.

"Why sorry?" Lindy hunches into her sweater. "Work was fine. Work was work. How's the garden?"

Maura squints at her. "You're not serious about that, are you?" Maura tears off a piece of muffin: zucchini, as it turns out. No nuts. Lindy knows what she likes. 

"Why shouldn't I be?" Lindy unties her kerchief—patterned with huge, technicolor hibiscus—and shakes out her curls, sighing, eyes and shoulders slumping as she leans back. "I don't if you've noticed, Mo, but I'm a big evangelist for gardening."

"Yeah, but you do it for a living," Maura says. "You're, like, professionally obligated to be a big evangelist for gardening."

"I don't know if you know this, but you're not actually _required_ to hate your job," Lindy tells her, then pushes up to her feet. "Come on, let's go take a look." She holds open Maura's door for her.

"I've done fuck all to it, you know," Maura cautions, but she gets up, doesn't she. "I just... threw the seed bombs into the mud."

"That's about all they need," Lindy says. "Come on come on, you are the most annoying human who has ever lived, come _on_."

Maura trails her through the little kitchen and out onto the back step, blindingly bright with late-afternoon light. It's May, she realizes. Almost summer. This far north, the days will last even longer. When did that happen?

"Oh, see, Mo, they're delighted," Lindy says, and Maura puts up her hand to block enough light that she can see: the muddy pit of her summer house's wildly neglected back yard, except it isn't, is it: instead the black damp dirt is dotted everywhere with countless little green sprigs by the dozen. Sprigs? Sprouts? Plantlets, at any rate: she goes to step off, and Lindy says, "Ah", and stops her: one big solid arm up to block Maura's chest. "Don't step on them," she warns. "They're just getting started, aren't they."

Her voice turns at the end, curving up, pleased. It's not wholly unlike the way she talks to Pepper.

"How's Pepper?" Maura asks, and Lindy looks at her. "Well, you didn't bring her," Maura says, defensive, and hunches into her sweater. "Is she okay?"

"She's asleep in the truck," Lindy says. "I didn't want her to have to put up with your stupid ass moods."

"My moods aren't stupid," Maura grumbles.

"They are, but we love you anyway. Should I get her?" 

Maura ducks her head. Last time Maura had shouted at Lindy. Lindy had shouted back. Pepper had gone into the bedroom and Maura'd felt awful for that until Lindy had rolled her eyes and gone back after her, Maura trailing, drenched with guilt, to find Pepper lying in the dead-center of the queen-sized bed that Maura never sleeps in unless Lindy's with her. Pepper had been fine. Pepper had been elaborately licking her own genitals. She had paused long enough to shoot Maura an extremely unimpressed look, thump her tail twice at Lindy, and then just gone right back to it.

"I should apologize," Maura says, then, "Wait. Will she hurt the plants?"

"Nah, she knows better, doesn't she?" Lindy gives her that broad, crooked smile. "Living with me."

So Lindy goes out and gets Pepper. Maura pets her silky ears and gives her a peanut butter treat from the slightly dusty jar on the kitchen counter, almost empty, and then Pepper picks her way gently through the new little plants in the backyard, sniffing at them with almost comical delicacy, while Lindy and Maura sit on the back step watching the sun sink over the neighbor's house, drinking the last of their tea.

 

The next day, Maura realizes that the entire house smells like professional disappointment and old Chinese take-out: _God_ , it's _awful_. She needs to open every window and scrub out the fridge and drive all her trash to the dumpster at Safeway, which she knows she shouldn't do but she also knows—from a half-dozen summers half-squatting in town before she bought the house—that they never lock it, because she can't stand having to smell three-week-old lo mein for another single second. 

She does the trash, at least. Then she kind of... grinds to a halt. She winds up sitting for half an hour in the car in the Safeway parking lot, playing 2048, for some reason, because she's out of new posts on Instagram. Then she goes to bother Lindy at work, because what the hell else is she going to do?

"You could, I don't know, _get a job_ ," Lindy tells her, puffing slightly.

"Doing what?" Maura asks. "A lot of call for entertainment lawyers out here?"

"To be fair, buddy, even if there were," Lindy says, so Maura flings a blob of dirt at her stupid, giggling face. "All right, fine," Lindy says, "I have known you _way_ too long to buy you as a member of the idle rich, come help me with this"; so Maura spends the afternoon getting a crash course in transplanting rhododendrons. 

When she goes home, she showers and fingers her curls loose, then heads out onto the back step, frowning out over the yard. The plants are twice as tall, now, thick and green. Fucking delighted with themselves, Maura thinks, disgustedly; then catches herself. Pauses. Taking a long deep—

—slow—

—breath.

All right. Sanity check: the plants are doing their plant thing, she guesses. That's what they do, isn't it? You plant them, and then they grow. It was what all of Lindy's various... green... things had done, back in college: all their windows crowded with huge, lush, jungle-green glossy thick leaves, plants growing in cut-up soda bottles and old yogurt pots and once, kind of memorably, in Maura's coffee mug, because Lindy'd got tired of her never washing it, and had commandeered it for her latest specimen, and Maura'd spent the rest of the year drinking out of a grody-ass cup she'd stolen from the dining hall, chipped and stained, because she wasn't going to use disposables like some kind of earth-hating _monster_ , okay. She loves the earth. She just... doesn't know that much about it.

So.

So the plants are just. Doing their thing. Seeds to sprouts to a dense lush carpet, practically before her eyes. It is, probably, kind of fucking magical. Death to rebirth, the circle of life et cetera, happening out in the back yard of a summer house she bought because that's what you do, when you have too much fucking money, and now has to live in full-time, because that's what you do, after you crash and burn at thirty-five. But. But: here she is. But: Lindy's just down the road. But: now she's got sprouting... flowers, or whatever, from Lindy's handful of dirty blobs that'd looked kind of like cat poop, just tossed willy-nilly into dirt and water and sun. Not dead yet, are they? And that's just something Maura's going to have to make peace with, probably.

She still needs to clean up the kitchen. She opens all the windows, at least. 

Then she kind of runs out of steam.

 

She finally gets to actually scrubbing out the fridge at 11:30 pm Saturday night, and then sleeps until ten on the sofa in her underpants and a sweater with a tea stain on the sleeve. She wakes up blinking and lies there in the sunlight staring up at the ceiling. What is she supposed to do now? Her laundry, probably. But that involves gathering up all her laundry, and sorting her laundry, and putting all her bras in little mesh bags so they don't wrap around the agitator and come out looking like cooking utensils that've gotten into an argument in a fabric store. It just seems like a lot of work. Lindy works Sundays: the busiest day in the nursery, she always says. Dozens of middle-aged tourists wandering over to look at—she doesn't know. Rhododendrons? Succulents? The mystery flowers running riot in Maura's backyard, pushing soft warm smells through all her open windows? She should ask Lindy. 

She blinks: once; twice, more slowly. Lying on the couch she feels trapped, crystalized: an insect caught in amber, her body glued in that one place, forever.

Water, she remembers. She's supposed to water. Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday in the summer, Lindy had said; and it's almost summer now, isn't it. The warm round-liquid sunshine spilling in through her windows, rolling over her, carrying that clean-dirt and warm-plant smell over and into her. 

Maura breathes deep, and rolls up to her feet. Maura'd paid for the hose, but Lindy'd had to show her how to screw it onto the spigot, teasing her about her manicure the entire time. Joke's on Lindy, Maura thinks, turning it on to aim the spray out across her carpet of emerald stems, just opening flowers: Maura hasn't had a manicure in ages. She soaks the backyard, long smooth sprays, careful to cover everything, just like Lindy had told her. She could trim her nails, though, she thinks. They're getting annoying. Have a bath, maybe, too: open all the windows again, so the sunshine keeps coming in while she does it.

 

Monday, the plants are over knee high. Lindy has Mondays off, so she brings Pepper over and they spend the morning lounging half inside, half out: dragging Maura's couch right up to the French doors, which stick when they try to get them both open, looking out over the steps down to the back garden: smelling sweet and clean and a little dusty: like Lindy, really. In between makeouts they wind up lying stretched out back to front watching Pepper playing, Lindy's head tipped back against Maura's chest, her 'fro unbound and tickling Maura's nose: sweet. Maura breathes deep.

"I should call someone and get the doors fixed," Maura says.

"They're going to take away your lesbian card," says Lindy. "Just buy some fucking WD-40."

"Fine, I should fix the doors," Maura corrects, and Lindy huffs, rubbing her palm over the backs of Maura's fingers, lacing them together. " _Is_ there a card, though? Why don't I have a card?"

"I don't know." Lindy unlaces and laces their fingers. "They probably saw your BMW and thought they had the wrong house."

"Oh, fine, fair," Maura says. "I guess I'll just have to live with it. Or sell the car."

"There is a card, though, just so you know," Lindy says. "Hillary gave them out."

"Those were Woman Cards," Maura says. "I have a Woman Card, thank you." Down in the garden, Pepper is trotting delicately amid the greenery. "If she'd given out Lesbian Cards we would've all turned up with power tools and truck-tie downs and gotten some real shit done, wouldn't we?" 

"Mo, if you've ever handled a power tool in your life, I will personally buy you the WD-40 for your doors."

Maura tucks her chin down. "You got me that Hitachi Magic Wand, does that count?"

Lindy laughs. 

Down amid the honey-sweet green meadow of the garden, Pepper sticks her nose against a purple bud, a tight bombish cluster of long silky petals not-yet-unfurling, and then sneezes. The flower pops open. Apparently satisfied, Pepper bounds off towards the back fence, where she flings herself down into the plants, vanishing beneath them. 

"What are these things I'm growing, anyway?" Maura asks. She's never seen a flower that color. Drowning, really, a purple that deep.

"Hm." Lindy stretches against her, then takes a deep slow breath. "They're a mix. A bunch of self-sowing California wildflowers—they'll naturalize—that means they'll grow again next year even if you don't plant them, for the botanically moronic among us." Maura smacks her shoulder. In the rustling greenery beside the fence, a paw darts up, then three more, waving wildly as Pepper rolls ecstatically. Lindy just giggles. "Some other stuff that likes this climate," she says. "The same ones I used out front, at my place." 

"What's that purple one, I meant," Maura asks. "That Pepper was sniffing."

"Aster," Lindy says. "Pretty, aren't they?"

"Yeah." Maura turns her face into Lindy's hair for a second, breathing in, then looking back at Pepper's jazz paws. She laughs, for no reason. It's weird. She didn't mean to. "She actually likes this, doesn't she?" Maura asks. "The garden, I mean. She kept catching them just before they opened."

"Hm." Lindy takes a breath, then pushes up to her feet, stretching. "She's a good dog. She's also definitely going to need a bath. Pepper!" Pepper rolls over and pops back up into view, one dusty ear flopped all the way back, grinning wildly. "Oh, look at you," Lindy says, and then laughs. Not a single hair on that dog is white anymore. "You're definitely going to need a bath before Maura lets you back on the sofa." 

Strange. It's a totally offhand comment, and Maura knows it; but it—it still makes something... weird happen. Under Maura's ribs. The sofa came from Ethan Allen. Maura'd bought it with her bonus last year and still had twice again as much left over, and the delivery guys had barely been able to get it through the front door. Lindy had laughed for about an hour solid. Maura'd spent the whole of her ten days vacation last year frantic that puppy Pepper would chew on it, for some reason. 

"Nah, it's fine." Maura takes a breath. "It's just a sofa."

Lindy twists her head up to look at her. Eyebrow raised.

"What?" Maura asks, throat tightening. "I'm trying—I'm fucking trying to _grow as a person_ , all right?"

"That doesn't mean you have to jettison everything you care about," Lindy tells her.

"Yeah, but what if all the stuff I care about is crap," Maura says, and then sighs. "You and Pepper are—oh, just. I don't care about the fucking sofa, Lindy."

Lindy sits up, pulling herself up cross-legged on the sofa in front of Maura's hips. Maura rubs at her own crumpled face.

"I'm not asking you to rearrange anything else right now," Lindy says, quiet. "You get me?"

"Fuck it." Maura shrugs. "It's my fucking house, isn't it? Just—c'mere, Pep"; and Pepper bounds up out of the flowers. Honestly, it looks like something in a movie: green and golden, a rainbow of satiny flowers trembling all around her. In the bright midday sun, the whole yard practically glows. When Pepper clatters up the steps, Lindy scoots back to make room, so that Pepper has plenty of space to crash up in between them in a gritty-ticklish cloud of dust and good, wild smells. That thing in Maura's chest twists hard; and then, all at once, loosens.

"It's a nice sofa, isn't it?" Maura asks Pepper, rubbing her soft, soft ears. Pepper thumps her filthy tail on the cushions, puffing up a cloud of dust, but before she can really worry about it Pepper is scooting up into Maura's lap, warm and soft and animal, breathing. "A good sofa," Maura tells her, "for a good dog," and Lindy wraps her hand around Maura's right foot and squeezes. "Yes, cozy, isn't it?" Maura tells Pepper, scratching her chin. Her toes flex in Lindy's hand, warm and grounding. "And all it took," Maura says to Pepper, quietly, "was ten years as a corporate shill, and of missing your mama."

Lindy rubs her hand up to Maura's bare prickling ankle. Pepper sneezes on Maura's face, and then sticks her tongue half inside Maura's left nostril.

 

On Tuesday, Maura has some kind of flare-up of the worst parts of her personality, and spends most of the morning vacuuming the sofa, and all of lunch online shopping for slipcovers. Then she experiences a kind of tidal wave of lover's-lovable-dog-related crushing guilt, and then she buys Pepper four toys to go in the order with the slipcover, then drinks half a bottle of wine, and then spends an hour trying to figure out how to cancel the order. Then, around four thirty, a little drunk and very, very disgusted with herself, she goes back out and flops herself down right in the middle of the garden. Flat on her back, the flowers tower over her: an alien planet in the middle of a scrappy patch of backyard on a side street in small-town Mendocino. What the fuck is she doing? How the fuck did she end up here? When she was a kid, she'd wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice, not someone who'd made the wrong fucking coked-up comment to the wrong fucking coked-up reporter about the wrong fucking coked-up starlet and wound up fired, blackballed, disgraced—just, fuck all of them, anyway. She'd thought she'd made it, and it turned out all she'd done was made it to a really great place from which to fall artistically. It'd had a certain amount of narrative cohesion, she'll give it that. She'd watch the movie. She just wished she was a little older. She didn't think Taraji P. Henson could realistically play under forty.

A shadow passes between her and the sun: cool and comfortable, smelling of dirt and water and crushed green things. 

"Well," Lindy says; "I can tell you're having a _great_ day."

"Oh, fuck you," Maura groans, and then Pepper starts licking her ear.

"But honestly," Lindy says, once they've relocated to the back step, and Maura is drinking a glass of water. "You want a slipcover, buy a slipcover. I don't totally understand why this bothers you."

"Look." Maura sighs. "If I were—if I'd been— _like you_ , you know. Just. Just another fucking—tree hugger—"

"Botanist," Lindy corrects.

"—or _whatever_ , and I'd moved out here like a minute after graduation, like moved out here _properly_ ," Maura corrects, "like I really meant it, like—this was a place I was going to set myself up and really give it a try, what do you think we'd be now? Like—that couple from the diner, with matching plaid and the Subaru—"

"Heaven forfend," says Lindy, smiling crookedly.

"—with, with a dog and two fat, terrifyingly precocious babies, or—"

"Mo," Lindy says. " _Maura_."

"I just mean," Maura says, "because that's not ever what I thought I wanted but I can admit that it beats the pants off anything I actually have, here scraping the bottom of the barrel of my thirties—"

"Can you just," Lindy says, " _shut up_ , for a second"; so Maura, just for a second, shuts up.

Lindy rubs at her face, and then takes a long drink of her water.

"You are," Lindy says, after a minute, "kind of a trainwreck, over there."

" _Not_ news," Maura says, and then sighs.

Lindy leans back against the doorframe, kicking out her bare feet. Her feet are big and solid; stable; squared. Maura's built like a beanpole and wears a size 8 narrow, but every part of Lindy just seems so fucking _connected_. You could send hurricanes at the girl, and she'd probably just... raise an eyebrow. Move on. 

"Look," Lindy says, and then sets her glass down, clicking against the concrete step solidly. "I like my job," Lindy says. "I like my dog, I like my life, I even like—you, for some reason"; and Maura snorts, and leans against her, pressing their shoulders together. "You didn't like your job," Lindy says, "and you spent a decade complaining about how you couldn't have a dog, and you didn't exactly love the rest of your life—well, fine! I never thought it'd happen, but you got out, didn't you?" Lindy rubs at her bottom lip. "But there's a lot of ways to be that aren't doing lines with former Disney stars three hundred miles away and also aren't being my terrifyingly overeducated housewife, all right?"

"I'd be a shitty housewife," Maura tells her.

"You'd actually be an alright housewife," Lindy corrects, "all that manic energy'd probably—one one soccer mom to rule them all, et cetera. But that's not the point."

Maura sighs, and then slides down a step, and then another, so she can rest her cheek on Lindy's thigh. "I don't want to be a soccer mom," she says.

"That's cool," Lindy says, and bends down to kiss her hair. "I really don't want you to be a soccer mom, either."

"I don't know what I _do_ want to be," Maura says, very quietly.

"That's cool too," Lindy says. "You were horrendously overpaid for a decade, so, like. You can probably take a minute to figure it out."

 

Maura spends the rest of the week reading up on native California wildflowers, and how to maintain a garden, because it beats the pants off of having absolutely fucking _nothing_ to do. She thinks she might plant some vegetables—tomatoes, maybe (?) (??) (what does she know from tomatoes) but everyone the internet says that they take weeks to sprout, which—just doesn't seem right.

"I mean, _weeks_ , literal weeks." Maura wipes sweat off her forehead. "Is it just—is this a California thing?"

"Hm," says Lindy. 

"Or—are tomatoes weird?" Maura asks, and then bends back over the weeding that Lindy's set her to: _Since_ , she had said, _my coworkers insist on not charging you admission to the Garden_. "I don't know anything about plants," Maura says, "but that seems kind of—"

"No," Lindy says, "tomatoes aren't weird."

Maura looks at her. "That's exactly the same tone of voice you got when you called me about Pepper, you know."

"Well, I don't know," says Lindy, sounding annoyed. "Your standards for plant weird are—probably kind of... off, living with me."

"I don't live with you," Maura says, and then swallows. "I mean—I only sort of live with you. I live. Near you. I _could_ live with you, I guess, but—"

Lindy rolls her eyes. "Not with that attitude, you can't."

"Do you _want_ to live with me?" Maura says, uncertain.

"Good grief, Maura, calm down, if I needed heteronormative talismans of commitment from you, I'd've taken off years ago," Lindy says.

"Oh," Maura says, and then licks her lips. "What do you mean, _my standards for plant weird_."

"I mean, my whole, you know." Lindy waves a gloved hand, and then bends back down over the dirt.

"No-o-o," Maura says slowly. "I don't know. What are we talking about?"

Lindy looks up at her, and then sets her trowel down. "Do you seriously mean," she says, "that you think wildflowers grow knee-high in a day?"

"What?" Maura stares at her. "I mean—they did. They do. Don't they?"

"Jesus Christ," Lindy mutters. "You're a fucking moron."

"What? No I'm not, I'm from _Lancaster_ ," Maura says. "How would I know anything about wildflowers?"

Lindy says, "Lancaster _has_ wildflowers," and then, "Lancaster is legitimately sort of _famous_ for its wildflowers," and then, "what the fuck, Maura."

"Lindy," Maura says. " _Never in my life_ have I paid attention to a plant, except when I've paid attention to a plant _for you_."

"Oh," Lindy says, and then flushes a deep, burnished mahogany.

"God," Maura mutters, "you're so high maintenance"; and then ducks, when Lindy flicks a clump of dirt at her face and then says, "Oh, I shouldn't, probably—coming from you, that's practically a compliment." Then Lindy laughs, loud and honking, when Maura sticks out her tongue.

She's still smiling, a little, when they both go back to their weeding. "Oh—not that one," Lindy says, when Maura's trowel is hovering over a tiny green spriglet. "That's a pygmy cypress, not a weed." Maura nods and moves over, going after a cousin a few inches over. "They only grow in this area," Lindy explains. "Mendocino and Sonoma, I mean."

"So they're interesting," Maura says.

"Well, to me, at least," Lindy says, and then scrapes her trowel over her little bit of dirt.

After a second, Lindy says, "You're taking this really well."

Maura lifts up her head.

"The whole." Lindy waves her trowel around. "I make plants grow, and you—have spent ten years not noticing."

"At this point, it's more like fifteen, actually," Maura says, and then puts down her trowel. "I mean, does this change anything? Are we going to break up over it? Are you a _wizard_ , Lindy?" she asks, as obnoxiously as she can manage; and it must work, because Lindy just rolls her eyes and goes back to digging. "Though," Maura says, "you should definitely tell me if you're a wizard, because I have some people for you to avada kedavra. What about this one?" she asks, and points at another little green sprout. "What do we think, does he live, or?"

"Nah, that's going to be a dandelion," says Lindy, "end him"; and Maura digs her trowel in and says, " _Cruciatus_ , motherfucker"; and Lindy throws her head back and laughs.

 

She has dinner with Pepper and Lindy and undresses Lindy slowly across the course of a fairly boring action movie and then at eleven goes home to sleep on her sofa because she's used to it, and she hates Lindy's awful, soft, comfortable bed. Besides, at home, she can wander around without waking Pepper up: a slow, pacing tour of the kitchen; the dusty guest room; the bedroom, with its pristine, white sheets. Outside the windows, the plants are shadowy, sleeping: a little patch of earth she'd bought, and neglected, but come back to, hadn't she. Past midnight it feels like a metaphor. For something.

It'd been easy—easier—to live in LA, and claim that that was the reason. Lindy had a life—a job—a fucking _vocation_ : breeding fancy plants for rich white hippies, Maura'd thought; but now it feels like something—else. What must it be like, she wonders. To look at a tiny curling tendril and see a weed, a flower, a storeys-high tree: unimaginable. Maura's never looked at anything and seen something other than a thing she could take apart. She has a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford and a J.D. from Berkeley, and everything that qualifies her to do is—off-limits, or awful, or just more of the fucking _same_ : a decade destroying, while flowers bloom at Lindy's broad feet.

"Hey," Maura says, when Lindy opens the door to her at ten minutes past seven in the morning, bleary-eyed and blinking. "I brought you a coffee."

"Is it Take Your Messed-Up Girlfriend To Work Day again today?" Lindy asks.

"Nope," Maura says, a ironic, plosive snap on the _p_. "But I'm going to the hardware store. Do you need anything?"

"Uh—I could use some potting soil, actually." Lindy leans against the doorframe, looking at her curiously, and asks, "Truck tie-downs and power tools?"

"Still not me, I don't think," Maura says, and takes a breath. "But I thought, for now, I could start with the WD-40."

**Author's Note:**

> [Pepper's doppelganger](http://anonym.to?http://www.swesr.org/Poppy_Just_Rescued.jpg). Lindy works at the [Mendocino County Botanical Gardens](https://www.gardenbythesea.org/). I'm not _saying_ they have an earth goddess on staff, but it's not out of the question.


End file.
